Jenkins touts tax reform

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President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said today that one of the first post-election orders of business is to reach a deal to reduce the nation's debt.

Boehner offered to pursue a deal with Obama, who won a second term on Tuesday, that would include higher revenues as part of a revamped tax code that reduced rates for all, according to The Associated Press.

U.S. Rep. Lynn Jenkins, R-Topeka, said as a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, she was ready to work on overhauling the tax code.

"Tax reform will raise revenue, reduce the $1 trillion in spending through the tax code, make the code more fair, efficient, and easier to comply with, and encourage job creation," said Jenkins, who also won re-election last night to represent the district that includes all of Douglas County.

Yes you can have lower rates and more revenues by broading the tax base. Switching to a consumption based tax like the Fair Tax means everyone pays tax on what they spend over the poverty level. This means criminals, foreign visitors, and others who escape paying taxes now will pay taxes under the Fair Tax. Even criminals need to buy new underwear once in a while -- the will pay taxes where they are living a tax free lifestyle now.

Broadening the base = more people paying = raising the rates for some. If some people are now paying zero and would later be paying more, they are having their rates raised.

The "fair tax" is anything but. It's a fuzzy math sales tax hike on the poorest and effective tax cut on the richest while prancing around pretending to be a flat tax. It's also a fine example of magical thinking, so I do thank you for that one as well.

No, it's not more correct. Both statements are true. If you'd like to make the argument that the tax base would somehow be more fair if everyone paid something in income tax, you're certainly free to make that argument. It is not, however, the argument that you can lower taxes for everyone and still end up with more revenue by "broadening the base." There is a finite amount of money, and somebody has to pay more if someone else is paying less. The honest argument is for Jenkins to admit that she wants to finance general tax cuts by raising taxes on the poor. And she's free to state it as an emotional argument, but it's still mathematically flawed in terms of the actual blood you can squeeze from those particular turnips.

Switching to an all-consumption-based tax, even one with a very expensive prebate like the FairTax, will inevitably hit the middle class very hard and ease the burden on the rich. It's pretty simple why that happens. There are a lot of things people need to a) survive, and b) exist in a modern world. Things like food, housing, electricity, water, phone service, a mode of transportation, etc. Some of those you can only reduce the cost so much, and others you really can't reduce at all. Poor people consume almost all of their income on these goods. Middle class people typically can save some money, but the vast majority of their income still goes to these goods. Upper class people, especially the very rich (which I'll say is somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million), have so much money that they couldn't possibly use even a majority of it on these goods. There's only so much steak and lobster you can eat, and there's only so many Lexuses you can drive. Once you adjust for how much of your income different groups consume, it's pretty clear that the FairTax is very regressive. If you want to go to a consumption tax, why not support a progressive consumption tax?

I have a serious soft spot for the FairTax. That is, from a Green/anti-consumption perspective. It would do a whole lot to reduce consumption, encourage untaxed DIY labor, local barter, local skills trading, fixing-instead-of-replacement, etc. Cuban-style car repair and resole-able shoes come into vogue.

Like said below, heavy consumption-end taxes on an economy predicated on largely-unnecessary mass consumption, though, is a major problem for the Walmarts of the world. Which is why it stands no chance at all of being implemented... the big-$ powers-that-be do not want people being discouraged from consumerism.

A consumption based tax in a consumption based economy is a recipe for disaster.

One thing I will promise you, very little of the Tea Party's/AFP/Kochs ideas are going to find their way into what gets passed. There is nothing fair about the "Fair Tax". Jenkins should just shut up. Nobody in DC cares what that bimbo has to say.

I called her topeka office this morning and asked the clowns if they'd gotten
the message that they can no longer twittle their thumbs and act
like their inaction is Obama's fault....kansas can no longer put it's
head in the sand....

Lynn Jenkins has never had an original thought in her life and is wasting her and our time in Washington. This Kansas republican machine is responsible for total fiscal chaos here in Kansas and for sending worthless people whose only interest is in creating class warfare in America by spending all their time thinking up ways to further separate the rich from the poor and dwindling middle class. The voters in Kansas are really pissing me off by their inability to see through the greed and selfishness of the republican party.

All Lynn Jenkins can do is parrot her party's leaders. There is never a new idea from her. All the republicans can say is that the entire fiscal mess the country is in is all the poor and middle class' fault so they want them to be responsible for fixing the whole mess. The rich should get more tax cuts.

National republicans are as bad or worse than Sam Brownback when it comes to fiscal irresponsibility. The reason we are in the mess in the first place is because the republican Bush had to have huge tax cuts while at the same time starting two wars that were never paid for. As far as I am concerned Bush and Cheney should be arrested for intentionally misleading the nation about reasons for getting us into the war in Iraq. It rises to a treasonous threshhold when you consider they took the word of a foreign government's spy agency who offerred no proof over that of an administration official who actually traveled around the world and found no evidence of any kind to support the foreign spy agency's charge, all because the administration official was a democrat. So now the paranoid Bush administration decided it could not trust any democrat member of its own administration. According to republicans, from that moment on the poor and middle class in America have been responsible for every economic problem that America has faced and every measure they have introduced has been designed to help the new "poor" who are actually the rich.

What this article is missing is a caveat from John Boehner. He said he was willing to work with Obama as long as the plan was something the Republicans could live with. Translation. It will be business as usual if not an out right double down by the Republicans. They are insisting on living in an alternate reality. That same reality cost them the election.